As we forecast decades ago, Japan was the first developed country to go off the demographic cliff. Their massive baby boom and the real estate and stock bubbles that came with it, all burst.

Japan has already gone through what the rest of the developed world has since or will go through shortly… but nobody gets it. Japan didn’t see it coming, and neither will Germany, Europe, or the U.S. ahead.

I just spoke in South Korea at the World Knowledge Forum and my message was that they’re Japan on a 22-year lag for the peak in their two baby booms.

They actually seem to get it more than most.

Never has an emerging country rose to wealth and developed country status as fast as Japan, in just three decades from the 1960s through the 1980s. And never has such a major economic and military power fallen so rapidly.

Japan’s steep demographic slide was so strong that, even while the rest of the world saw the greatest global boom in history (as we also forecast), everything crashed.

Japanese stocks went down 60% in the early 1990s and real estate followed the same amount. Stocks eventually went down 80% in 2003, and real estate has never bounced – still down 60% today in residential, and 80% in commercial.

But Abe Shinzo, Japan’s prime minister, and Haruhiko Kuroda, its central bank head, still think they can just stimulate their way out of the endless demographic landslide. They’re convinced this is just a monetary problem of not enough inflation to get consumers to spend.

Hate to break it to them, but not only do aging consumers spend less and less, especially on real estate – they die.

How do you get them to spend then?

In early 2013 this dynamic duo declared war on deflation (which is laughable) and aggressively increased QE, to more than double that of the Fed and the ECB at their peak rates. But then, they increased it another 60% in late 2014 to triple.

And sure, their stock market doubled – as pumping up stocks seems to be about the only thing QE’s capable of – but their debt has risen to the highest in the world at 246% GDP, and 680% for total private and government!